Screen Floor

A long corridor at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories recedes between two rows of equipment. On the right stand the double shaker screens that passed coal finer than 4mm through to the briquette factory. On the left run the cog roll crushers that milled the coal down to that size for screening. The crushers carried spring-loaded rollers, set so that a foreign object slipping past the raw coal bunker magnets would force the rollers apart rather than break them. Diagonal shadows cross the dust-covered concrete floor. Electrical conduit and a switch box are mounted on the right-hand hopper, and the space narrows toward the far end.

This screening line sat inside the briquette works, where the briquetting presses were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract for two factories of 2,100 tons per day capacity. The plant is the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens and conveyor cascades surviving together. Morwell brown coal proved unsuitable for briquetting because of its high alkali and sulphur content, so Yallourn coal was railed across the interconnecting line to feed these screens and crushers. Briquette flow ran continuously until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the screen floor on 30 March 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.